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That's exactly what happens. The Retron 5 rips the rom off your cart temporarily. It only keeps it until you remove the cart. The most interaction that it has with an original cart is that it can copy saves from and to the cart.

As for compatibility, it's hit-and-miss. For example, Virtua Racing for the Genesis worked until the last update. One time, they updated and completely broke Master System compatibility. Most homebrew won't work either, and even when they do, they come up as "unknown game" without an option to manually edit the title. There is no 32x compatibility.

As for lag, fighting games are unplayable using wireless controllers, and nearly unplayable with wired controls. Most other genres are playable though.

Edit: Almost forgot. You can play ROMS on it by simply IPS "patching" any game.

...just stick your cart on top of it, so you can look down at it from time to time and have the same experience.

Haha, good point. If it's only emulation - there's not much point in the original carts. Still, it's SOMETHING... maybe it's just me trying to justify going cheaper than the consolized GG while still using carts.

Haha, good point. If it's only emulation - there's not much point in the original carts. Still, it's SOMETHING... maybe it's just me trying to justify going cheaper than the consolized GG while still using carts.

There really is no point of getting a Retron 5. It's overpriced. The fact that your forced to get a PBC to play SMS (instead of them putting an SMS slot over a Famicom slot) as well as an adapter sold by Hyperkin for GG games (more money in their pockets) shows they're just milking stolen emulators and cheap hardware. One of the emulators they use is Genesis Plus, which supports Genesis/MD/SMS/GG/Sega CD without any carts or CDs at all, but the stupid Retron 5 is the only emulation platform that forces you to use carts.

It's actually much more worth while to emulate using either a Raspberry Pi, Original Xbox, Ouya, or a Wii and just keep your carts stashed away than to put them in the cheap, grip of death pin connectors used on the Retron 5 while ALSO emulating them, not to mention the crazy high amount of input lag the Retron 5 has.